The four-year-old children produced only the VA past tense suffix
_-katta_ most of the time. Even for existing NAs, when they were supposed
to use the NA suffix _-datta_, they used the incorrect suffix _-katta_
about 50% of the time. With novel adjectival input, they produced the VA
suffix _-katta_ more than 87% of the time regardless of the type of input.
The NA suffix _-datta_ was used not more than 8% of the time. These
results indicate that the suffix _-katta_ is a default adjectival past
form for the four-year-old children.
In Sum, the results of the experiment indicate that the children's default
past tense suffix for adjectivals is different from that of adults. This
fact raises an interesting questions from learnability point of view: How
do children (re-)learn the correct default suffix for adjectivals? What
triggers this (re-)learning? In order to answer these questions, this
paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of different possible accounts
for this change of the default forms between the children and the adults.
References
Kuno, Susumu. 1973. The Structure of the Japanese Language. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Martin, Samuel. 1975. A Reference Grammar of Japanese. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Nishiyama, Kunio. 1998. The Morphosyntax and Morphophonology of Japanese
Predicates. Ph.D. dissertation. Cornell University.
Urushibara, Saeko. 1993. Syntactic Categories and Extended Projections in
Japanese. Ph.D. dissertation. Brandeis University.
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About the PLC23 Committee
Previously held Penn Linguistics Colloquium: PLC22 (1998), PLC21 (1997)
Penn Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania